Run your first Cost Insight
The fastest first run is a bulk one: press Cmd/Ctrl + Enter and CloudPouch analyzes every eligible AWS service in the selected account — EC2, EBS, RDS, S3, EKS, Lambda, and more — in a single pass. When it finishes, you have a list of resources that are costing money for no good reason, with estimated impact and recommended actions.
Run a single Cost Insight
Section titled “Run a single Cost Insight”If you already know where the money is going — say, an EBS bill that keeps growing — analyze just that service:
- Open CloudPouch and select the AWS profile for the account you want to analyze.
- Choose the AWS service or cost area you care about.
- Click Check Cost Insights.
- Review the findings and pick a next action.
The supported Cost Insights reference lists what CloudPouch checks per service.
Run Bulk Cost Insights
Section titled “Run Bulk Cost Insights”Start a bulk run with Cmd/Ctrl + Enter, or from the menu: Analysis -> Start Cost Insights Analysis. This is the right first move on an unfamiliar account, because waste rarely lives where you expect it.
During the run, each service shows a live status badge — Queued, Done, or Failed — so you can start reading finished results while the rest are still processing.
A first bulk run on a typical account finishes in a few minutes. Very large accounts — upwards of $1 million/month across many active regions — can take 15 minutes or more, depending on the number and type of resources.
Cost Insights run on the Current Month and Previous Month timeframes. If analysis is not available, CloudPouch tells you why instead of failing silently — common reasons are an unsupported timeframe, an organization-level view, or another analysis job already running.
Reading the results
Section titled “Reading the results”Each finding names the affected resources, their AWS service and region, the estimated cost impact, and the recommended action — for example, an unattached EBS volume to delete, a GP2 volume to migrate to GP3, or an EKS cluster paying an Extended Support surcharge.
Two things to check before trusting a “clean” result:
- Permission issues. Missing IAM permissions look like “nothing found” in most tools. CloudPouch separates the two: after a bulk run, a collapsible Permission issues panel lists every AWS API call that failed, with the service, region, API operation, and error code (such as
AccessDeniedorOptInRequiredException). Fix the policy with the AWS permissions reference and re-run. - Timeframe. A resource created this week shows little cost in Previous Month data. Check both timeframes for a full picture.
What a first run can find
Section titled “What a first run can find”First runs on mature accounts are where the big numbers hide. In one 2021/2022 account, the EBS Cost Insight flagged roughly 17,000 GP2 volumes and a GP2-to-GP3 migration worth $18,890/month. In another, volumes attached to thousands of stopped EC2 instances were billing $150,000/month; replacing them with snapshots saved $1.32M/year. Stopped instances stop compute billing, but every attached EBS volume keeps billing for its full provisioned size — which is why this pattern goes unnoticed for years.